Summary:
Against all odds, cancer survivor Lang
Ellis is celebrating the one-year anniversary of her “death sentence” when her
beloved husband drops dead on the tennis court.
Devoted to him, she
reels from the loss, focusing on her precious granddaughter but struggling with
her bossy only child, Teddy, and his aloof girlfriend, Sarah.
With her historical
family estate in jeopardy, Lang realizes her husband wasn’t as perfect as she
thought.
The secret he
carried to his grave can ruin her life.
If she lets it.
Information about
the Book
Title: Making Arrangements
Author: Ferris Robinson
Genre: Contemporary
Pages: 319
Release Date: 15th August 2016
Publisher: Self-Published
Goodreads Link: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30657889-making-arrangements
Author Information
Ferris Robinson lives in a beautiful part of East Tennessee with her
husband and two dogs. The mother of three grown sons, she delights in the fact
that her dogs obey her – more or less.
A former columnist
for the Chattanooga Free Press, she
is the editor of the Lookout Mountain
Mirror and the Signal Mountain
Mirror. Her work has been published numerous times in The Christian Science Monitor and the “Chicken Soup for the Soul’ series. She is a columnist at chattanoogan.com.
The author of
several cookbooks, including “Never Trust a Hungry Cook,” which she wrote in
college and the “Gorgeless Gourmet’s Cookbook,” Ferris was featured on the
cover of Women’s World magazine.
Promoting her super-easy but healthy recipes, she made numerous television
appearances and sold 10,000 copies of the Gorgeless Gourmet’s Cookbook,
pre-Internet. Paid subscribers from every state in the U.S. received her
newsletter featuring “practically fat-free recipes for super-busy people.”
Her book “Dogs and
Love – Sixteen Stories of Fidelity” has 94 reviews on Amazon, and her other
books include “Authentic Log Homes.” “Making Arrangements” is her first novel.
Website: www.ferrisrobinson.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/fkrobinson
Excerpt
What do you wear the day after your husband
dies? Lang wondered, damp from
the shower. She put on her old sweatpants and Jack’s practically disintegrated
Auburn sweatshirt because they were so soft. She wanted to feel something easy
on her skin. She pressed the frayed ribbed collar to her nose and breathed in
the sharp smell of aftershave and bacon grease. Jack’s smell.
Teddy sat hunched over the
kitchen counter with Sarah and Katie D. on either side of him. Sarah leaned
into him, her cloud of pale hair floating out over the back of Teddy’s brown
sweater, hovering with static electricity. Lang watched the three of them for a
moment from the doorway. She could hear murmurs of their sentences: Katie D.’s
singsong voice, Teddy’s hoarse rumble, apologizing for something, and Sarah
speaking so tenderly her voice didn’t sound human.
Lang closed her eyes,
holding on to the doorjamb for balance, and felt Sarah’s words like they were
something physical, covering her softly. Gently.
“Mom!” Teddy said, scraping
the chair away from the counter. She jerked to attention.
He looked like he hadn’t
slept in days; the collar of his button-down shirt was uncharacteristically
wrinkled, and his azure eyes were flat.
“Oh! I didn’t hear you!” A.
J. said, appearing suddenly from the hall bathroom. She looked Lang up and
down, grimacing. “You still got that rubber band around your wrist.” Lang
pulled the frayed cuff down to her knuckles, holding the soft fabric in her
fists.
A. J. looked like a
different person except for her crumpled tennis clothes. Her hair was styled and
her eyes were bright and her skin was dewy. She looked like she’d found a day
spa in the hall bathroom. Lang sniffed the air, detecting vanilla and
deodorant.
“I smell something,” Katie
D. said.
“Halston,” A. J. said,
flapping her hands in circles about her neck in an effort to spread the heavy
perfume around the room. Katie D. crinkled up her nose.
Lang ran her fingers under
her own eyes, trying to remember the last time she’d looked in a mirror. She
should have put on some makeup after her shower. Concealer under her eyes at
least. She reached her hands out toward her son, then curled them into useless
fists as she shook her head slowly.
Teddy wrapped his arms
around her, and she felt her boy sink into her, collapsing for a second. His
breath caught, and his chest shuddered against her shoulder.
“Shhh,” she said. “Don’t
cry.” She felt him stiffen before he stepped away.
“How you holding up?” Teddy
asked brusquely. “Who would have thought, huh? Sorry, bad joke. Dad would have
laughed, though.”
Lang squeezed the edges of
her mouth up into a semblance of a smile. No one would have ever thought Jack
would be dead instead of her. Hilarious.
For the release day blitz, Ferris is
giving away one e-book copy of the book to one lucky winner!
a Rafflecopter giveaway
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